Thursday, 27 May 2010

Fans in Europe, your wait is over: Roger Walters announced today that he will bring The Wall Live to Europe for a 28-date tour in the Spring of 2011. Kicking off in Lisbon on March 27, the tour will cross the continent before wrapping up in Dusseldorf on June 18. The complete list of confirmed dates can be seen below.....

Wednesday, 26 May 2010

Jack Dangers is protective of sharing too many technical details about TapeLab, his Mill Valley music studio. The place is a tangle of cables, pins, and shiny knobs that evokes post–World War II films showing telephone operators making manual switchboard connections. It's here that the producer keeps a 600-pound synthesizer so rare that he's one of the only musicians putting it to use; a vocoder collection that'd make T-Pain envious; and a gong emblazoned with the logo of Meat Beat Manifesto, his highly influential 23-year-old band. Mac laptops and a freshly dead computer tower attest that he's no stranger to digital, but it's clear that Dangers' passions lie in analog gear.

Dangers' latest musical partner, an avowed Meat Beat fan named Jon Drukman, is a digitally leaning electro producer who works under the name Bass Kittens. Together, Dangers and Drukman call themselves the JDs. The moniker pays tribute to James Brown's band (and their own initials), and isan unintended metaphor for how they complement each other musically the way key Brown players Fred Wesley and Bootsy Collins did.

The JDs' full-length debut, Education, released May 4 via Drukman's digital label, Pretension Records, is a meeting of analog and digital minds. The electro- and breakbeat-heavy album blends the warm feel of the former with the crispness of the latter, and disparate sounds ignite. Waterlogged minor keys dovetail with metallic beats on the opener "Into the World." "I Don't Know When to Stop" offers a vocoded voice cheerfully proclaiming the title as '80s breakdancing beats dissolve in a tangle of robotic bleeps, while "Dead Calm" mounts a multilayered attack of bizarre boings, spoken samples, and skittering ringtones. It's a taut collection of songs paced for the dancefloor, yet still possessing enough sonic details for the homebound headphone listener.

Most of Education was recorded in two months; it was released as soon as it was completed. "One thing I like about music being centered on the Internet is that the artist is in control," Drukman says of the speed of the record's release. Meanwhile, the Meat Beat Manifesto album will have been finished for more than a year when it comes out in September. The lag is partly because Dangers is still in discussions with labels interested in releasing the physical product in different territories.

The JDs — who've shared the stage for live stints in mutual friend Mark Pistel's band, Pistel — started working on music for fun about seven years ago. They'd run into each other at a party, and Dangers invited Drukman to TapeLab to check out its monster console. At the time of their first recording session, Drukman's wife was pregnant. After his daughter was born, Drukman put his musical efforts on pause. But he shared the two songs he and Dangers had produced with Pietro Da Sacco, a DJ on UC Irvine radio station KUCI. Da Sacco often played the exclusives on his show, Digital::Nimbus, and periodically asked Drukman whether more music would surface. Last fall, those queries spurred Drukman to call Dangers and see if he wanted to collaborate again.

It was good timing for Dangers. He was winding down work on the eleventh Meat Beat Manifesto album, tentatively titled Answers Come in Dreams. He'd also finished coproduction on a 1957 spoken-word recording from Beat-era humorist Henry Jacobs and former San Francisco poet laureate Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They began exchanging musical sketches by e-mail, and got together at TapeLab a handful of times to record improvisational pieces.

The resulting Education showcases a worthy battle for rhythmic supremacy between analog and digital audio technology. It also shows Dangers and Drukman as united minds behind the machines. (Comments By Tamara Palmer Wednesday, May 26 2010)

In addition, Jack Dangers recentyl completed a mix for the Digital:Nimbus.....

"D::N is excited to present The Most Music; an exclusive Meat Beat Manifesto 1-hr Ableton Live mix.

Jack Dangers' Meat Beat Manifesto project has inspired an entire generation of musicians and has constantly evolved (and recycled) sound into creative reformations over the past 20+ years. For this exclusive mix Jack unleashes an audio-collage of seismic induced basslines. The Most Music bends, tweaks and reverberates electro-dub with ease and control that it is clearly evident MBM's smorgasbord of analog-to-digital machinery is firmly intact from start to finish. A few classic MBM offerings and new (unreleased) tracks are mixed with vintage radio identifications, obscure broadcast announcements, Brazilian snippets, familiar (deconstructed) samples, syncopated beats, wobbly bass and heavy distortion.

The Most Music is a ravaging dub-infested dose of heavily drenched rhythms, off-center funk-breaks and creative sampling summed up in a 60-minute Ableton Live jam-session by Jack Dangers himself. Have a taste of what's to come with the next incarnation of MBM's sound pallet as it rips through the airwaves of KUCI 88.9 FM via Digital::Nimbus Radio".

Friday, 14 May 2010

Roger Waters’ will be performing his rock opera The Wall in a series of concerts on The Wall Tour 2010. The US dates have been announced on his new website in what is thought to be the first leg of the tour. Hopefully Europe will happen in 2011.

Commencing on 15th September 2010 at Air Canada Centre in Toronto, Ontario, the tour will see The Wall performed live 35 times for what is one of the most eagerly anticipated tours of the Pink Floyd members past and present.

It has also been reported that the tour will "move on to Europe for another 57 dates beginning in March. Waters says he'd like to take the show to other territories, including South America." [source]

The band currently consists of Roger Waters on Bass/Vox, Snowy White and Dave Kilminster on guitars and California group Venice doing male backing vocals. A treat!

Thursday, 6 May 2010

"Yep, Gilles finally got around to a Brownswood Basement Special that he’s been promising since about 2003! He spent a whole day rummaging through stacks of 12″s, white labels and old acetates and pulled out about 40 old favourites. Photek, Peshay, Goldie, DJ Hype, Source Direct, LTJ Bukem, Roni Size, Ed Rush & Optical… 110% underground heaters, classic material and golden memories, it’s by no means a comprehensive history of D&B, but it is a great snapshot of a scene in full flow."

"The King of Cut and Paste, Jaguar Skills brings his never less than deft chopping hand to the history of drum and bass! From hardcore, through jungle to liquid and jump-up onto dubstep in the present day, this is a bumper mp3 that you have to have in your collection".

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